Psychopomp Magazine Winter 2016 | Page 18

-absorption, the guilt of wanting something halfway formed, than when she rolled her eyes. He wanted to make her do it again.

“Did you notice that we still have the same gravity though?” she said.

“What if I hate it? What if it’s different for me and I don’t love it at all?” he said suddenly, and he had a vision in his head of some small crying thing cradled in the nest of his bloody forearms. Would it be like a pupa, the amalgamation of eyes and lips of so many people stretching hundreds of years back? They told you that it was a thing sitting in your gut just waiting to be activated, the love of a thing you couldn’t know, that couldn’t know you except for a face and timbre, a part of a new kind of air. They said it was instant love, maybe out of narcissism or evolutionary amendment, but what if when he looked at its face, he didn’t see his own, and saw in its place, nothing at all? She sighed.

“Isn’t it a little self-absorbed to be thinking about the merit of new life when all around us is dying? When we’re dying?” she said, and to him it seemed like a stupid thing to say, since nothing new simply had merit because of its novelty, which like his own heartbeat, was an ephemeral thing.

She crossed the meridian of the shift and slid into his lap. There was some hesitation in him, but mostly desire. Her limbs were all around him. When she moved to clutch his face, he noticed that she had some garish color on her nails, that there was no typical plushness about her mouth, but a viciousness in the way it carved upward through her face, drew tightly across her teeth. She kissed him roughly, and he could not pretend to mimic the rhythm.

She curled her body around him, and he was burning up. It was only when he relaxed that he felt her fingers close around his throat.

“It’s probably better a child not be on the end of your indifference,” she said softly, tightening her grip. He tried to pry the hands away but they were spindly, strong. Still there was empathy in her eyes. “A child’s relationship with the father dictates how it will interact with men from then on. Isn’t that obvious to you?

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